Chasing the rainbow and looking for love

[austin_dern]

On trying some out, I think I'm falling out of love with the palmtop concept. The ones with miniature keyboards seem right out; the keys are too small. The buttons are easy to press, but I can press only one or two at once. I type fast; my last measured speed was around 105 words per minute, and that's low as I ran out of typing material during the test and had to find the examiner for instructions. I don't type letters; I type words. Anything slower is achingly slow. Plus their miniature keyboards don't have semicolons, insufferably cramping my style.

The ones with freeform writing letters don't fit me either. I write small, newsprint-type small. This is small enough the devices can't make out my letters. Yeah, the cure is to write larger. I have tried for thirty years to write larger, in response to the pains I've given parents, teachers, friends, coworkers, and students. I must at this point conclude I'm not going to ever learn to write bigger.

The freeform draw-and-sketch-out types don't really work either; I tried scribbling a little spectral analysis and found the symbols turned to pixellated gibberish. Yeah, yeah, write larger. Not gonna happen. The stylus is part of the problem; my ideal writing instrument is a fountain pen, delivering precise lines exactly as thick as I want just where I want while gliding frictionlessly over paper. It's the only graceful thing I do, but I do it well. I'll try again, but I'm leaning towards the scanner and reference books.

Trivia: To raise money for his rubber research, Charles Goodyear pawned all his possessions, including his children's schoolbooks. Source: Life Science Library: Giant Molecules, Herman F Mark.

Currently Reading: Development of the Space Shuttle, 1972-1981, T A Heppenheimer.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Auto-word completion is something I've not been comfortable with, attempts to use it have only slowed me down. I've gotten to a reasonable comfortability adn familiarity with my cell phone that lets me go rather briskly with two-thumb-typing, and I can do a slow amount of typing 'blind', one handed, while driving. What slows me more than anything else SMS-wise is punctuation, capitalization, and stubborn insistence on 'to', 'thanks', 'later' and such. I'm very comfortable with acronyms, and occasionally typo-ridden, but something in my soul recoils against 'Fine thx how r u', even if it would be 30% faster. I just wish the asterisk didn't take 6 key presses to access, as that's a need for *emphasis* or *emoting*.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you have that reaction to SMS abbreviations like that. I may be longwinded but the assurance that a glossary isn't needed for an average English-reading person to understand me is worth it.

An asterisk six keypresses away? That's almost as bad as not having a semicolon at all.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Exactly. The msot common punctuation is available via the '1' key, which cycles period, Excalamation point, question mark.. The comma is around 6, which is a fair enough place, given that my SMS speech tends to be a bit shorter and choppier.

The asterisk is mostly through 'joystick' presses to get through a menu: (Left- not always needed), Center, Down x4, Center, Down, 1. So that's 7 or 8, alhough the four downs can be executed fairly rapidly. There is room for automatic text.. so I could store phrases like "Good morning" and "Oh, work was fine".. but it's 6 keypresses to get to that menu, and then scrolling in there, so it never gets used.

Now, this is one of the *best* SMS clients out there for a non-keyboard phone, at that. Given my propensity for SMS, I'm pondering switching to something with a full keyboard, at such time I can justify the $40 a month cost up from my current $20-25.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Wow ... really, that's a lot of keypressing. I suppose there aren't many alternatives available, given the nearly fixed set of keys and the needs on them but it's still intimidating to this outsider.